“It was a common custom for Cadmon and his friends to sing songs.”
“The Singing Angels” Van Eyck
Royal Museum Berlin
For many years Cadmon continued to live in the monastery at Whitby, making noble use of this poet’s gift that had been granted to him. And it was here at Whitby that he finally died. He had been unwell for several weeks before his death, but it was not supposed that his sickness was serious. One night, however, the night on which he died, he asked his nurse to take him to the infirmary, which was the part of the monastery where those brothers who were dangerously sick and on the point of death were usually cared for together. The man was surprised that Cadmon should want to be taken to the infirmary, but he did as he was asked to do. Cadmon seemed to be bright and happy, and talked cheerfully with the other sick people in the infirmary. When it was about midnight, he asked if the Eucharist was there in the infirmary. “Why do you ask that?” his friends said. “You are not so near to death that you need ask for the Eucharist.” But Cadmon asked for the Eucharist again, and when he had it in his hand he inquired whether they were all kindly disposed and at peace with him. When they said they were, then Cadmon continued: “And I, too, am at peace with all men.” Having made his last communion, he asked if the time was near when the brothers of the monastery should arise and say the prayers known as nocturns. “It is almost time,” they answered. “Let us then wait for it,” he said; and blessing himself with the sign of the cross, he lay back upon his pillow, and so falling asleep, as peacefully and as gently as he had lived, he passed to his final rest.
This is the simple story of the blameless life of the first English poet whose name has come down to us. Other poets there must have been before Cadmon, poets who sang the stories of the bloody combats of English heroes before the days of Augustine and Aidan. From the very earliest times the English have had their bards or minstrels, whose task it was to keep alive the fame of the nation’s great men. But not even the names of any of these earlier heathen poets are known to us, and but a few fragments of their songs have survived to our day. These songs were of the kind which Cadmon could not sing, but which his companions, at their feasts and banquets, all sang so freely to the accompaniment of the harp. This heathen minstrelsy is now all lost and silent, while down through the ages the clear voice of Cadmon is heard, singing the old story of the Creation of the World and of the ways of God to man. From Cadmon to Milton it is a thousand years, but the poor cowherd who became the chief ornament of Hild’s ancient monastery on the cliff above Whitby sang his songs in the same spirit as the author of “Paradise Lost.”
The “Uncle Remus” Stories
Their Evolution and Place in the Curriculum
By Josephine Leach
Part One
The fame of the “Uncle Remus” stories, according to Joel Chandler Harris, himself, was an accident. But it is quite possible, that the fame has not been quite as much of an accident as his modesty declares it to be.
Mr. Harris was the son of a very poor woman in Georgia. She had very little to give her children, and very early Joel Chandler was put out to work. When, but a mere lad, he went to work as printer boy on the plantation of Mr. Joseph A. Turner. Mr. Turner was a well educated and cultured gentleman, who spent his leisure hours in publishing (on his own plantation) a small paper, voicing the sentiment of the times.